ChasingShadows

The Invitation

An outsider at the door. A woman he can't have. A night he was never meant to see.

Eliot has never belonged anywhere like Gerald Ashworth's. A high-school English teacher who splurges on rainbow sprinkles for his own birthday, he drives his rusting Corolla up a fog-bound hill toward a Tudor mansion lit like a theatre — because Rose asked him to come.

Rose runs the kind of glittering charity galas Eliot has only ever read about. She is poised, magnetic, and engaged to a man named David, whose firm has just won a government contract no one will explain — and she has begun, quietly, to look for Eliot in the lonely rooms of her life. Tonight she wants to show him a library of signed first editions and teach him to dance before the song runs out.